Medical facilities, such as hospitals, health care centers, and nursing homes, can invest heavily in physical assets, such as gurneys, medical carts, diagnostic equipment, monitoring equipment, treatment equipment, bandages and other supplies, drugs, and so forth in order to provide medical treatment to patients. Hospitals must purchase and maintain physical assets to perform testing procedures, perform scans, determine medical diagnoses of patients, and perform advanced surgical procedures. Many of the assets at a medical facility are mobile or portable. While in some cases, all or part of an asset is disposable and may not be reused, in other cases, assets may be reusable.
Often, hospital equipment can be very costly, and, therefore, the high equipment cost may require that the hospital permit one or more units or floors to share equipment. For example, an ultrasound unit may be capable of being used on one or more floors or hospital units (e.g. gynecology and radiology). Equipment in some instances may be taken from one location in a medical facility to another. Often, equipment remains at the location of the facility at which it was last used. For example, when a patient is transported in a wheelchair by an attendant from a patient's room to a fitness center of a hospital to receive therapy, the wheelchair may be left at the fitness center location. In this example, the patient may be returned to the patient's room by another attendant, who obtained a wheelchair from another location, leaving the original wheelchair at the fitness center. Another example is that a patient may be discharged from a hospital using one of several exit locations of the hospital. If the patient is discharged using a wheelchair, that wheelchair is likely to remain at one of the discharge exit locations.
Tracking the physical assets of a medical facility can be difficult. Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags can be used to determine locations of equipment, supplies, and other physical assets. However, RFID tags have a limited short distance use and, therefore, commonly require RFID tag readers to determine a location of the RFID tags. Additionally, RFID tags used for asset management systems provide a minimal amount of information, such as a location of an object.
Where the physical assets of the medical facility can be expensive and may be used in critical situations, many of the physical assets require regular maintenance and/or replacement. Maintaining a large number of physical assets in a large environment, such as a medical facility can be difficult.
Reference will now be made to the exemplary embodiments illustrated, and specific language will be used herein to describe the same. It will nevertheless be understood that no limitation of the scope of the invention is thereby intended.